February 23 – April 15, 2012

March 23 – November 4, 2012

May 3 – June 17, 2012

June 29 – September 2, 2012

September 21 – November 25, 2012

November 22, 2012 – January 2013

SUSAN PHILIPSZ

December 7, 2012 – January 2013

PERMANENT EXHIBITION

OPENING HOURS

GUIDED TOURS

Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m.

Saturdays at 3.00 p.m. and Sundays at 11.00 a.m.

Rudolf Stingel
February 23 – April 15, 2012


Installation view of "Rudolf Stingel", Whitney Museum, New York 2011, Photograph by Stefan Altenburger, Courtesy of the artist

For more than twenty years, Rudolf Stingel’s works have interrogated the concept of painting and expanded its definition. In the 1980s, he demystified the image of the artist as an inspired inventor, which was then still widely held, by publishing a book entitled “Instructions / Istruzioni / Anleitung” that revealed how his abstract paintings were made and included directions enabling anyone to imitate them.

In addition to the classical means of painting, such as paint and canvas, Stingel employs industrial materials like insulation panels, styrofoam, carpeting, and potter’s clay. Since the early 1990s, he has used these materials to “carpet” now the floors, now the walls of exhibition rooms, in a significant contribution that has defined the contemporary debate over the relationship between painting and space. Lined with a monochrome carpet or silvery insulation panels, space itself becomes the support medium of “painting,” or rather, of monochrome color. The artist’s interest in the materials he employs also extends to their specific surface qualities and the ways in which they can be modulated: impressions left on a carpet can easily be obliterated, restoring a tabula rasa sort of state, whereas the graffiti-like engravings in the insulation panels are lasting traces of human interaction.

In 2005, Stingel created a portrait of his gallerist, Paula Cooper, adding this classical genre to his otherwise abstract oeuvre in a new branch of his oeuvre that has since grown into a series of photorealistic self-portraits in shades of gray based on b&w photographs.

At the Secession, Rudolf Stingel presents a new work produced specifically for this context.
Rudolf Stingel, who was born in Meran (IT) in 1956, lives and works in New York (USA) and Meran (IT).



Michael Snow
Recent Works
February 23 – April 15, 2012


Michael Snow, Piano Sculpture, 2009, Installation with four projections, 15 min looped

Michael Snow. Recent Works is the first solo show presenting the work of the influential Canadian artist Michael Snow in Austria. The exhibition features selected photographs and film installations from the past ten years that exemplify the spectrum of his art. An experimental filmmaker, painter, sculptor, photographer, and professional jazz musician, Snow has worked in a wide range of media for more than fifty years. His art is defined by his sustained interest in questions of the perception of reality and its eidetic representation as well as the means of that representation itself. Applying a rigorous approach, he examines the structures, processes, and limitations of the various media, often operating in the interstices and exploring one medium from the perspective of another. Each one of his works pursues a specific strategy. The works on display in the Secession address issues including simultaneity in the interplay between image and sound, the plane of projection as the basis for the perception of filmic imagery, beholders’ perspectives, and the object status of what photography depicts, or in other words, its realism.

Michael Snow, who was born in Toronto (CA), lives and works in Toronto (CA).
In collaboration with the Film Museum, Vienna



Close-up – GUSTAV KLIMT ~ GERWALD ROCKENSCHAUB – Plattform
A project by the Secession, the Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
March 23 – November 4, 2012


Gerwald Rockenschaub, Plattform, Photo: MargheritaSpiluttini

Calling certainties into question, broadening horizons, shifting viewpoints: with the twin exhibition projects “Close-up – GUSTAV KLIMT ~ GERWALD ROCKENSCHAUB – Plattform,” artist Gerwald Rockenschaub, Austria’sFederal Office for the Protection of Monuments, and the restorers of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna reflect on a key work from the period of artistic renewal at the dawn of the twentieth century. On the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth, the Secession offers visitors a detailed look at the Beethoven Frieze, shedding both scientific and artistic light on this icon of cultural history.



David Claerbout
Diese Sonne strahlt immer
May 3 – June 17, 2012


David Claerbout, Long Goodbye, 2007

The Belgian artist David Claerbout works primarily with time-based media such as animation, video and sound as well as photography. His contemplative projections trace back the characteristics of these former autonomous media on the brink of disintegration. The works deliberately require tranquility and patience, often employing parallel arrangements like motion versus standstill, duration versus moment, evanescence and change versus permanence and continuity. In his first solo show in Austria, David Claerbout will present a selection of works, most of them recent. Diese Sonne strahlt immer refers to electric light as a replacement for sunlight. Claerbout is fascinated by how human perception will interpret footage that is filmed directly against the sun as ‘intense’, while being a feeble projected light beam reflected on an ordinary white wall. His works seem to regret the loss of sensorial experience and yet his subjects include natural phenomena like reflection, wind and sunlight.

His early media-critical video works are based on appropriated photographs, e.g. Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, 1932 (1998) while recent fictional films take the concept of the simultaneity of antagonisms a step further; the narrative recedes into the background as natural phenomena that elude deliberate control, such as the sunlight, become the real-time protagonists (see the thirteen-hour Bordeaux Piece, 2004). To immerse themselves in Claerbout’s work, viewers accordingly need one thing above all else: plenty of time.

David Claerbout, who was born in Kortrijk (BE) in 1969, lives and works in Antwerp (BE) and Berlin (DE).
The exhibition David Clearbout is a cooperation with the government of Flanders.



Stephan Dillemuth
Öffentliche Verkehrsmittel
May 3 – June 17, 2012


Stephan Dillemuth, Brunnen, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger

Stephan Dillemuth believes that his possibilities as a visual artist must be conceived in light of the ongoing transformation of the modern public sphere. In thinking about his own role and what he can do with his art, he examines questions such as: to which extent can self-organization and personal and collective integrity be established within the framework of our society of control? With its inherent methods of reflection, analysis, and experimentation, art, he believes, creates beauty, but it also has the potential to change society.

In order to review contemporary issues, Dillemuth sometimes studies historic movements (such as the Lebensreform movement or alternative attempts at social renewal of the 1970s) and situations of social transformation (such as the Munich Soviet Republic of 1918–19), but his experimental artistic means always also call his research in question, generating new insight. The results of these experiments include installations, theatrical performances, and collaborative works as well as videos, lectures, and publications.

Stephan Dillemuth, who was born in Büdingen (DE), lives and works in Munich (DE).
www.societyofcontrol.com/



Slavs and Tatars
Not Moscow Not Mecca
May 3 – June 17, 2012


Slavs and Tatars, Not Moscow Not Mecca, 2012, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low). Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010), and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would've, could've, should've (JRP-Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at Salt, Istanbul, Tate Modern, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul, and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past five years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (em>Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, 79.89.09, A Monobrow Manifesto), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic. The new cycle of work includes contributions to group exhibitions– Reverse Joy at the GfZK, Leipzig, PrayWay at the New Museum Triennial and Régions d’Être at the Asia Pacific Triennial–as well as solo engagements with Not Moscow Not Mecca at the Secession, Vienna, Khhhhhhh at Moravian Gallery, Brno, Beyonsense at MoMA, NY and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Slavs and Tatars is a collective founded in 2006.



GROUP EXHIBITION
Mutatis Mutandis
June 29 – September 2, 2012

curated by Catherine David
with: Babak Afrassiabi, Edgar Arceneaux, Hany Armanious, Louidgi Beltrame, Andrea Branzi, Elisabetta Benassi, Luke Fowler, Suzanne Treister


Secession Wien, Hauptraum

In 2012 the French curator Catherine David is invited to develop an exhibition project for all exhibition spaces at the Secession. From 1994 to 1997 Catherine David was arts director of Documenta X in Kassel, and from 2002 to 2004director of Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. After studying linguistics and art history, she worked as a curator at the Centre Pompidou (1981–1990), before moving to the Jeu de Paume (1990–94), both in Paris. Since 1998 she has been head of the Représentations Arabes Contemporaines project, which takes the form of exhibitions, seminars and publications in various European cities. In 2005–06 Catherine David was guest researcher at the prestigious Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where she continued her work on the Arab world. In 2007 she organised the interdisciplinary event "Di/Visions: Culture and Politics of the Middle East" at the House of World Cultures in Berlin and Bahman Jalali retrospective at Tapiès Fondation in Barcelona. In 2009 David was curator of ADACH (Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage) pavilion at the Venice Biennal. Her last publication is Hassan Sharif. Works 1973-2011 (Hatje Cantz).



Kerry James Marshall
September 21 – November 25, 2012


Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir I, 1997, Courtesy: of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

In his figurative pictures, many of which work with the conventions of history painting, the American artist Kerry James Marshall addresses the social and cultural experiences of African Americans and, more generally, the variety of ways identities are coded and marginalized within a dominant culture. His depictions of everyday life in urban housing projects (Garden Projects series, 1994–95) and middle-class living rooms decorated with pictures of revered civil-rights heroes (Souvenir series, 1997–98) as well as his double portraits in historic garb (Vignettes, 2003–07) pay homage to the utopias of the civil-rights movement and bring a confident and reflective approach to defining shifting ideas about integration and history, of individual fulfillment and freedom. The ambiguity of the scenes Marshall depicts and the way he depicts them always also raise the question of how we read images and what our judgment is based on.

Building on the logic of collage, Marshall has developed a complex pictorial language that crosses cultures by fusing references to Western art history with stylistic elements of a Black aesthetics. His art is also shaped by his painterly interest in the formal qualities of flatness. He has found a way to translate the reality of Blackness into his paintings by using shades of black that make figurative elements appear almost abstract, while his textures of drippings, spatterings, and brushstrokes disrupt the classical conception of spatial depth, suggesting a break with reality and the naturalism usually associated with history painting.

Kerry James Marshall, who was born in Birmingham, ALm (USA), in 1955, lives and works in Chicago (USA).



Anne Hardy
September 21 – November 25, 2012


Anne Hardy, Incidence, 2009, Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Anne Hardy’s large-format photographs are polyvalent images of artificial spaces created for the sole purpose of their photographic documentation. In painstaking work that often takes months, the artist builds highly detailed life-sized “stage sets” in her studio using found objects, things bought in second-hand stores, leftovers, and refuse scavenged from the street. Hardy then takes a single picture of each set in order to define its depiction, exercising tight control in particular over our perspective on these fictional spaces. Serving as documents of now absent places, the images show situations that are often confusing, filled with traces of human presence and mysterious activities; disturbingly, however, the fictional protagonists are forever absent. Another characteristic feature that pervades Hardy’s work is the ingenious and very deliberate employment of mirrors, which the artist uses to create the impression of spatial depth on the two-dimensional surface of the photographs—an impression, however, characterized by fragmentation or unusual visual angles. Hardy herself describes her photographs as “fictional documentation.” Her art negotiates the question of the real in visual media also by skillfully unsettling the perception of reality by means of its—patent—construction. Anne Hardy’s exhibition at the Secession is the first to present her work in Austria.

Anne Hardy, who was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire (UK), in 1970, lives and works in London (UK).



Anja Kirschner and David Panos
September 21 – November 25, 2012


Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Courtesy of the artists and Hollybush Gardens, Foto: Alessandra Chila

The films of Anja Kirschner and David Panos stage collisions of historical, literary, and popular culture references in complex dramas that reflect on the role of art in society and its relation to socio-political phenomena like gentrification and financial speculation. Their fragmentary mode of narration moves, on the basis of conscientious research, between documentation, historical actualisation, melodramatic staging and a critical engagement with different genre devices and modes of performance.

Their recent films have looked at the historic emergence of art in relation to class and political power. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard, set in the early 18th Century, dramatises the relation between the thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard and the entrepreneur and author Daniel Defoe to draw out the relations between fiction, abstraction, and finance capital. The Empty Plan (2010) looks at theory and praxis in the work of Bertolt Brecht, playfully reimagining scenes of Brecht in exile in California, working on his unfinished theoretical work The Messingkauf Dialogues, and interpolating these with rehearsals of his 1931 play The Mother, in which Brecht’s techniques are contrasted with those of Stanislavskian naturalism.

At the Secession, Kirschner and Panos will premiere a new film that they've been working on in Greece over the period of one year. It will draw on a diverse set of references including archaeology, philosophy, pedagogy and ritual and explore the way in which monetisation and industrial labour have transformed the way we see, represent and interact with the world and the affective impact they have on our lived experience.

Anja Kirschner (born 1977 in Munich, DE) and David Panos (born 1971 in Athens, GR) live and work in London (GB) and Athens (GR).
http://kirschner-panos.info/



SUSAN PHILIPSZ
November 22, 2012 – January 2013
Friesraum

Since the late 1990s, Susan Philipsz has been making sound installations – recordings of her a capella versions of old folk ballads, workers’, pop and film songs. Her performative sound works are always site-specific; they echo the histories as well as acoustic and musical aspects of a location or exhibition space. Philipsz is particularly interested in music’s emotional impact, how songs can associate with and evoke memories and emotions and how music can influence the perception of a space.

Susan Philipsz’ sound works are conceived for public spaces. “Lowlands” (2010), for instance, three chanted versions of an old Scottish folk song, was played under three bridges in her hometown Glasgow. Philipsz was awarded the Turner Prize in 2010 for this piece. With “Surround Me” (2011) she conceived a song cycle for the City of London especially for the weekends when it is empty and silent. Her interest for the spatial aspects of sound is expressed in multi-channel audio installations with which the artist concisely manipulates sound’s perception in space.

Susan Philipsz was born in Glasgow in 1965. She lives and works in Berlin.



Yael Bartana
December 7, 2012 – January 2013


Yael Bartana, Mur i Wieża, 2009, Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

The works of the Israeli artist and filmmaker Yael Bartana examine widely accepted social rituals and structures and, more specifically, questions regarding the cultural identity and historical construction of her native country and the tensions and conflicts that result. In her distinctive poetic approach, she balances the factual and the fictitious, documentation and propaganda, evoking ironic overtones to undermine certainties, turn symbols on their heads, and open up multiple new meanings. Her film Wild Seeds (2006), for instance, shows young Israeli pacifists reenacting the forcible evacuation of Jewish settlers from the West Bank.

Bartanas’s recent project, the video installation … and Europe will be stunned is the official Polish participation at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2011. It is the first time for a non-Polish national to represent Poland in the history of the Venice Biennale. Bartana’s three films Mary Koszmary (2007), Mur i wieża (2009) and Zamach (2011) revolve around the activities of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), a political group that calls for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers. The films traverse a landscape scarred by the histories of competing nationalisms and militarisms, overflowing with the narratives of the Israeli settlement movement, Zionist dreams, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Palestinian right of return. Apart from realising the film trilogy, a new political movement has been established by the artist. In spring 2012, the first official JRMiP Congress will take place in Berlin in association with Berlin Biennale 7.

Yael Bartana, who was born in Kfar Yehezkel (IL) in 1970, lives and works in Tel Aviv (IL) and Amsterdam (NL).



PERMANENT EXHIBITION
Gustav Klimt: THE BEETHOVEN FRIEZE



OPENING HOURS
Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m.


GUIDED TOURS
Saturdays at 3.00 p.m. and Sundays at 11.00 a.m.



The exhibitions are realized through support of:

Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession



For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-10, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
E-mail: presse@secession.at